My book, Cultivating Taste: Courtesy, Aesthetics, and Selfhood in Early Modern England, argues that the intersecting demands of social expediency and fictional representation helped to shape ideals of literary reception, appreciation, and connoisseurship in early modern England. Revising a scholarly consensus on the significance of courteous gesture and performance, the book argues that courtesy in early modern England was not the exclusive domain of ambitious elites: rather, courtesy was a pervasive, multifaceted, and powerful cultural preoccupation, with important links to the history of subjectivity and aesthetics. Literary judgment itself came to be governed by dynamics of obligation and reciprocation not so different from the rules regulating social interaction and courtly self-presentation; literary taste became, that is, a variety of courteous performance. Self-scrutiny, emotional restraint, and an awareness of the nuances of debt and obligation – all qualities celebrated in early modern courtesy-books – were the core principles of a new aesthetic stance.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter One explores George Puttenham’s 1589 treatise on English poetics, The Art of English Poesy, which examines the physiological aspects of courtly poetic response, and links persuasive poetry with social success. Chapter Two, on John Lyly’s prose romance Euphues, discusses introspection and cultivation in Lyly’s work, paying particular attention to the text’s focus on gift-giving and epistolary exchange. Chapter Three argues that Book VI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene depicts characters struggling to extract moral lessons from ambiguous aesthetic experiences. Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and The Winter’s Tale are the focus of Chapter Four, which explores scenes of courtesy gone wrong: the moments of misprision and mistaken identity that occur when courteous gestures are misunderstood. Chapter Five discusses Milton’s ideal of the “well-governed appetite,” suggesting that the concept regulates hospitality and courteous reciprocation in the coercive exchanges depicted in A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle and Paradise Lost.
My research intervenes in several key areas. Most broadly, it contributes to recent scholarship about the significance of courtesy in early modern English culture by arguing that courteous gestures and performances were not merely public rituals that overlaid private emotional experience. Rather, I suggest, courteous exchange was constitutive of the early modern self. What is more, while recent studies in book history have focused on the economic conditions regulating literary production, I suggest that authorship and reading communities were not simply circumscribed by the economic realities of a developing market economy. Producing and consuming texts, that is, were acts that were imagined in terms of webs of desire, obligation, and strategic self-advancement.

Several parts of the book have been published or presented. A version of Chapter One has been published in Renaissance Studies, and I have been invited to revise and resubmit an article based on Chapter Three to The Sixteenth Century Journal. In addition, a conference paper drawing upon material from Chapter Five is in currently in preparation for presentation at the 2015 meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.

My second book project, Fantastic Prayer: Privacy, Imagination, and Religious Expression in Reformation England, will focus on the history of private prayer, looking particularly at fantasy as a key conceptual category that consolidated the imaginative powers of the early modern subject. By examining the ways in which Reformation debates about the legitimacy of prayer leveraged fantasy as a charged term and considered privacy to lie at the very heart of religious practice, Fantastic Prayer will argue that the conceptual boundaries of the mind were continually contested and reordered between the 1530s and the end of Elizabeth’s reign. The project will pay particular attention to the semantics of private experience, to literary expressions of the possibilities of prayer, and to the role played by Henry VIII’s Injunctions in delineating a new conceptual space for secrecy, concealment, and imaginative work.